moving fedora to a new system

[Jaime Davila]

Hello all,

I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am about to 
get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to the 
one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed in 
it. Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is 
there a way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my 
current system), and then feed that to yum in my new system?

Thanks in advance,

Jaime

-- 

******************************************************
Jaime J. Davila
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Hampshire College
School of Cognitive Science
jdavila at hampshire dot edu
http://helios.hampshire.edu/jdavila
*******************************************************

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 04:25:51PM -0500, Jaime Davila wrote:
>  Hello all,
>  
>  I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am about to 
>  get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to the 
>  one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed in 
>  it. Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is 
>  there a way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my 
>  current system), and then feed that to yum in my new system?
>  
>  Thanks in advance,
>  
>  Jaime 
I really haven't thought about this a lot but two observations might
be made. 
1. If you never ran a yum clean then all the rpms you installed
through yum will be in the directories:
/var/cache/yum/<repository name>/packages. So that takes care of the
names of the rpms installed.

2. However to install them on the new machine you would have to write
a script that would I think( I am not sure about this) remove the tail
part of the rpm name (such as the .lvn.1.4.i386.rpm part of the rpm
 mplayerplug-in-2.80-0.lvn.1.4.i386.rpm. Then you would have to feed
 them to yum -y update in small enough glops as to not exceed the 256
 character limit on a execution line.

 That is the way it seems to me but maybe I am  all wet and someone
 will correct me or find a better way to do this.
-- 

=======================================================================
Disobedience:  The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.
-- Ambrose Bierce
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: [phone]

[Anthony Joseph Messina]

akonstam(a)trinity.edu wrote:
>  On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 04:25:51PM -0500, Jaime Davila wrote:
>  
> >Hello all,
> >
> >I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am about to 
> >get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to the 
> >one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed in 
> >it. Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is 
> >there a way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my 
> >current system), and then feed that to yum in my new system?
> >
> >Thanks in advance,
> >
> >Jaime
>  
>  I really haven't thought about this a lot but two observations might
>  be made. 
>  1. If you never ran a yum clean then all the rpms you installed
>  through yum will be in the directories:
>  /var/cache/yum/<repository name>/packages. So that takes care of the
>  names of the rpms installed.
>  
>  2. However to install them on the new machine you would have to write
>  a script that would I think( I am not sure about this) remove the tail
>  part of the rpm name (such as the .lvn.1.4.i386.rpm part of the rpm
>   mplayerplug-in-2.80-0.lvn.1.4.i386.rpm. Then you would have to feed
>   them to yum -y update in small enough glops as to not exceed the 256
>   character limit on a execution line.
>  
>   That is the way it seems to me but maybe I am  all wet and someone
>   will correct me or find a better way to do this. 
based on your step #2, couldn't he just do a "yum install *.rpm" in the 
directory which contained all the rpms?

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[Jaime Davila]

Well, the issue with that is that, in the destination machine I don't 
have the rpm's yet. I would get the list from the source machine, and 
then use that list in the destination.

Anthony Messina wrote:
>  akonstam(a)trinity.edu wrote:
>  
>  
>  
>  based on your step #2, couldn't he just do a "yum install *.rpm" in the 
>  directory which contained all the rpms?
>   
-- 

******************************************************
Jaime J. Davila
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Hampshire College
School of Cognitive Science
jdavila at hampshire dot edu
http://helios.hampshire.edu/jdavila
*******************************************************

[William Hooper]

akonstam(a)trinity.edu wrote:
>  On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 04:25:51PM -0500, Jaime Davila wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> >
> >
> > I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am about to
> >  get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to
> > the one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed
> > in it. Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is
> > there a way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my
> > current system), and then feed that to yum in my new system?
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> >
> > Jaime
> >
>  I really haven't thought about this a lot but two observations might
>  be made. 1. If you never ran a yum clean then all the rpms you installed
>  through yum will be in the directories: /var/cache/yum/<repository
>  name>/packages. So that takes care of the names of the rpms installed. 
I'd think it would be much easier to look at the RPM database instead. 
Look at /etc/cron.daily/rpm for an example RPM query and /var/log/rpmpkgs
for and example the output.

-- 
William Hooper

[Jaime Davila]

akonstam(a)trinity.edu wrote:

>  I really haven't thought about this a lot but two observations
> might
>  be made. 
>  1. If you never ran a yum clean then all the rpms you installed
>  through yum will be in the directories:
>  /var/cache/yum/<repository name>/packages. So that takes care of the
>  names of the rpms installed. 
HMM. After running yum clean those directories are empty in my system.

>  
>  2. However to install them on the new machine you would have to write
>  a script that would I think( I am not sure about this) remove the tail
>  part of the rpm name (such as the .lvn.1.4.i386.rpm part of the rpm
>   mplayerplug-in-2.80-0.lvn.1.4.i386.rpm. Then you would have to feed
>   them to yum -y update in small enough glops as to not exceed the 256
>   character limit on a execution line. 
Will those names follow a clear convention? That is, can I find a 
consistent delimiter between the package name and the package version? 
If there is, I can then write a script to do the installs.


-- 

******************************************************
Jaime J. Davila
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Hampshire College
School of Cognitive Science
jdavila at hampshire dot edu
http://helios.hampshire.edu/jdavila
*******************************************************

[James Wilkinson]

akonstam(a)trinity.edu wrote:
>  2. However to install them on the new machine you would have to
> write
>  a script that would I think( I am not sure about this) remove the tail
>  part of the rpm name (such as the .lvn.1.4.i386.rpm part of the rpm
>  mplayerplug-in-2.80-0.lvn.1.4.i386.rpm. Then you would have to feed
>  them to yum -y update in small enough glops as to not exceed the 256
>  character limit on a execution line. 
Jaime Davila wrote:
>  Will those names follow a clear convention? That is, can I find a 
>  consistent delimiter between the package name and the package version? 
>  If there is, I can then write a script to do the installs. 
I think you only have to remove the trailing .rpm, which can
conveniently be done with the basename command. For example,
for i in $(grep glibc /var/log/rpmpkgs) ; do basename $i .rpm ; done | xargs yum info
should retrieve information from yum on all the glibc packages installed
on your system.

There is a slight problem with this: if there are updates made available
between the generation of rpmpkgs and the issuing of the yum commands,
then the yum command may attempt to install the old version, which may no
longer be available through yum. For this reason, it would make a lot
more sense just to generate the list with
rpm -qa > rpmpkgs
(which doesn't include the trailing .rpms anyway), copy that to the new
computer, and then run
xargs yum -y install < rpmpkgs

I'm not sure which 256 character limit akonstam is referring to: it
sounds like he means the maximum length of a bash command line. But
man xargs suggests this limit is at least 131072 characters. In any
case, xargs should deal with it.

Hope this helps,

James.
-- 
E-mail address: james | Mike Andrews' Corollary to Murphy's Law:
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | In any sufficiently large collection of texts, every
                      | possible misspeeling, as well as some that are not
                      | possible, will occur.

[Kenneth Porter]

On Friday, February 24, 2006 4:25 PM -0500 Jaime Davila 
<jdavila(a)hampshire.edu&gt; wrote:

>  I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am
> about to
>  get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to the
>  one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed in it.
>  Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is there a
>  way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my current
>  system), and then feed that to yum in my new system? 
"rpm -qa | sort" lists all installed packages and their version/release. I 
pipe through sort as the raw rpm output is in arbitrary order.

You could use dump to back up the old laptop and then restore it into place 
on the new one, booting from a rescue CD. First use a minimal installation 
on the new laptop to get the partitions the way you want them.

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 16:25 -0500, Jaime Davila wrote:
>  Hello all,
>  
>  I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am about to 
>  get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to the 
>  one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed in 
>  it. Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is 
>  there a way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my 
>  current system), and then feed that to yum in my new system? 
On original system:

$ rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}\n' | grep -v gpg-pubkey > rpmlist.txt

Copy rpmlist.txt to new system.

On new system:

# yum install $(cat rpmlist.txt)

Paul.

[John Summerfield]

Jaime Davila wrote:
>  Hello all,
>  
>  I've been using fedora for a while in my personal laptop. I am about to 
>  get a new laptop, and would like to end up with a system as close to the 
>  one I have as possible in terms of the packages that are installed in 
>  it. Everything I have installed so far I have installed via yum. Is 
>  there a way of making yum output what it knows is installed (in my 
>  current system), and then feed that to yum in my new system? 
I generally do a disk to disk copy using dd for such. Knoppix is 
probably best, but fedora rescue disks will probably work.

Network the two machines, boot both from CD and create a partition at 
least as large as your old one, then _carefully_

dd if=/dev/hda2 | ssh otherbox dd of=/dev/hda2

Change hda2 as appropriate for each box.

Once the copy's done you will need to run e2fsck (assuming ext2 or 3), 
and you will need to run resize2fs of otherbox has a larger partition.

resize2fs may give you additional instructions.

Alternative, safer, ways of copying include making your filesystem on 
otherbox and then using tar (or similar tool) in a similar manner to dd 
above:
tar clC /mnt/hda2 | ssh otherbox tar xpC /mnt/hda2
or scp
scp -pr /mnt/hda2 otherbox:/mnt/hda2

or rsync
rsync --times --perms --recursive (and probably more options) \
   /mnt/hda2 otherbox:/mnt/hda2

Note tar and rsync can omit files and directories, and you may wish to 
do this - do you want /tmp's contents?
You could also export one of the filesystems to the other using nfs.

Each requires manually configuring grub on otherbox which you can do:
chroot /mnt/hda2
vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
install-grub '(hd0)'


For your own sake, read the relevant documentations: I'm likely to have 
forgotten something you need to know.

Did I mention backup? Okay, you know that.


Even if you choose a fresh install, some of these can be used to copy 
the contents of /home (and other valuables) to otherbox.





-- 

Cheers
John

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